America Aflame (78 page)

“Let Us Prey,” 1871. One of a series of merciless cartoons Thomas Nast drew satirizing William M. Tweed and his Tammany gang in New York City. In this drawing, Tweed and his crew of “vultures”—Peter B. “Brains” Sweeny, Richard B. “Slippery Dick” Connolly, and A. “Elegant” Oakey Hall are waiting for the storm of protest to “Blow Over.” It didn't, and Tweed was convicted and imprisoned due in no small part to Nast's caricatures. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

In the wake of the Tweed scandal, a group of citizens appointed a blue-ribbon panel, the Committee of Seventy, to study reform measures including imposing literacy and property qualifications for voting. The clamor to limit democracy was considerable. Historian Francis Parkman complained it was foolish if not criminal to leave the city's destiny to “the dangerous classes.” Liberty, he argued, “means license and politics means plunder.” The committee managed to end public welfare (in the midst of a depression) but accomplished little else. By the late 1870s, Tammany was back in business. The city instituted civil service reform to limit the politicians' power of appointment. In 1882, Congress would pass a federal Civil Service Act, placing the reins of government in the hands of professionals who would carry out their responsibilities in an objective, apolitical, and honest manner. Or so the theory went.
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Southern whites opposed to the Republican governments and black suffrage learned from the media frenzy surrounding Tweed and his cohorts. They understood that corruption as a practice was not as important as corruption
as an issue
, especially if they could tie it to suffrage. Corruption played well to northern audiences, who need only reference their own backyards to sympathize with white southerners. The issue of corruption lent more credence to the charges that these southern governments were illegitimate.

This is not to say that southern Republican governments were chaste. The Republican administrations in South Carolina were especially profligate. The state government expanded services and infrastructure but grew the state debt from $5.4 million to $15.8 million between 1868 and 1872. Evidence indicated that some lawmakers benefited financially from these expenditures. The South Carolina General Assembly spent $125,000 on wine and whiskey for lawmakers during one session alone. A printing firm, the Republican Printing Company, bribed legislators to award it state contracts at inflated rates. South Carolina's printing bill soared from $21,000 in 1868 to $450,000 in 1873.

Some of the lawmakers enjoyed well-furnished quarters. Between 1868 and 1872, South Carolina spent $200,000 on furniture for the statehouse. An inventory taken in 1877 indicated that only $17,775 worth of furnishings remained. There were also bond frauds involving state securities and discounted railroad stock sold to legislators in exchange for favorable votes. Key officials in the state government led the carnival, including Republican governor Robert K. Scott (a white northerner) and his successor, Franklin J. Moses Jr. (a white southerner). Perhaps the most notorious of the crew was John J. “Honest John” Patterson, who bought a U.S. Senate seat in 1872 for forty thousand dollars, bribing state legislators who elected him. These lapses were not unique for the Gilded Age, but they indelibly tainted regimes whose legitimacy was already suspect. The
New York Times
spoke for many disgusted northerners when it noted in 1874 that “ignorant negroes [in South Carolina] transplanted from the cotton fields to the halls of the Capitol, where they have been drilled by unscrupulous white adventurers, have naturally made a mockery of government and bankrupted the State.” Little wonder that support for southern regimes was eroding quickly, even among staunch northern Republicans.
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Not all Republican governments in the South were tainted, but the few examples afforded the Democrats opportunities to attack all these regimes as the logical outcome of universal suffrage. The improvements in infrastructure, education, and the economy accomplished by southern Republicans provided, ironically, visible evidence of alleged profligate spending, higher taxes, and the opportunity, if not the reality, for graft.

Democratic chicanery in the South did not raise a similar concern in the North. Southern Democrats stuffed ballot boxes, levied poll taxes, prevented Republicans from voting, and changed polling places without general notification. One rarely heard of corruption once the low-tax, low-service, lily-white Redeemer governments took office. In Georgia, for example, corruption charges in 1875 led to the impeachment and resignation of the Democratic state treasurer, the impeachment and conviction of the comptroller general, and the resignation of the commissioner of agriculture. James “Honest Dick” Tate, the Redeemer state treasurer of Kentucky, was so popular voters reelected him to ten consecutive terms. One day he was gone, and, officials discovered, so was $229,000. None of this condoned Republican failings, but a double standard operated in the nation.
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Investigations into government corruption typically revealed cozy relationships between public officials and corporate leaders. Entrepreneurs, the heroes of the postwar era, began to receive closer scrutiny after the Tweed investigation uncovered ties between Tammany and railroad executives. Mark Twain enjoyed taking the moguls to task. He taunted railroad magnates “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, two of the most unlovable of the era's entrepreneurs. “Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right,” he baited Vanderbilt. “I didn't remember ever reading anything about you which you oughtn't be ashamed of.” Of Gould Twain wrote, “The people had
desired
money before this day, but
he
taught them to fall down and worship it.” Gould attempted to corner the gold market; he manipulated railroad stock, and he ruthlessly bought out competitors. Small in stature, dark in complexion, he was rumored to be Jewish.
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The scandals swept over public opinion in rapid succession. Gould, Vanderbilt, Tweed, and then the Credit Mobilier revelations splashed into the press and nearly drowned the Grant administration. Transcontinental railroad promoters had set up Credit Mobilier (named after a French bank that failed in 1867) as the independent construction company through which all funds to build the railroad were funneled. The construction company raised funds from the sale of stocks and bonds and repaid investors with government subsidies as each section of the road was completed. The men who ran the railroad and the construction company were one and the same, and they spread stocks and bonds liberally throughout the Congress to obtain friendly legislation. Credit Mobilier was the only company bidding on construction contracts. Congress set the upper limit for bids, and, miraculously, Credit Mobilier's bids matched the ceilings, enabling the directors to sell bonds to that amount, though construction costs for each section were well below the bids. The directors of both companies pocketed the difference and provided gifts to friendly congressmen and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. The Pacific road was a moneymaking enterprise long before a single train crossed the continent.
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Credit Mobilier erupted into a scandal in September 1872 when someone discovered a railroad company notebook with congressmen's names alongside the amount of stock each would receive. Credit Mobilier, however, was the product of decades of intimate relationships between government and railroads. The arrangements uncovered by the investigation broke no laws. It was doubtful whether the Pacific railroad would have been completed without close ties between legislators and directors. Still, the lawmakers' supplemental income shocked many Americans. Mark Twain, in the preface to the London edition of
The Gilded Age
, hoped the book would illuminate America's “all-pervading speculativeness” and “the shameful corruption which lately crept into our politics, and in a handful of years has spread until the pollution has affected some portion of every State and Territory in the Union.”
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When the smoke cleared from these financial shenanigans in 1873, Jay Gould stood atop the Pacific railroad's organizational chart. Within a decade he ran much of the country's rail system. Gould also controlled New York City's rapid transportation system, several newspapers, and Western Union, the nation's leading telegraph operator. Conspiracy theories about Gould abounded to such a degree that even the
New York Times
saw humor in the situation. “But straightaway we are assured that ‘JAY GOULD' is at the bottom of the whole affair, as he is said to be at the bottom of everything that goes on nowadays. We strongly suspect that he will yet be found to … have had something to do with the hard Winter, frozen water-pipes, and plumbers' extravagant bills.”
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The reformers were not amused. Gould represented the Gospel of Money run amok, the rogue individual who could buy a Congress and seize the nation's key transportation and communication networks. In 1869, Gould and his partner “Diamond” Jim Fisk sought to wrest control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt by printing bogus stock. Gould showed up at the New York State legislature in Albany, hoping to convince the lawmakers to legalize the stock and thereby gain control of the road. Vanderbilt and Gould conducted a bidding war, paying off legislators to vote their way. Both entrepreneurs had suites in the same hotel, trunks full of cash, and a parade of lawmakers coming and going. Gould gave away $600,000, sufficient to gain a 101-to-5 vote in the legislature to legitimize his stock.
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Gould set up a five-man executive committee to run the Erie Railroad. Two of the five spots went to Boss Tweed and Brains Sweeny, ensuring there would be no future challenges to the Erie empire. The Empire State, indeed. Nor was New York an isolated case. One journalist described the government of New Jersey as “a lobby containing a State Legislature.” Nor was New York City the only metropolis where such financial hi-jinks occurred. Washington, D.C., went bankrupt in 1870 after a spending spree grading streets and paying off black voters to elect the Republican ticket. That ended democracy in the nation's capital; Congress took control of the city. Cleveland city councilmen concocted a system in which each city contract let out would let in a given amount to each member.
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The collective apoplexy over Gould and his ilk was out of proportion to their alleged crimes. The Pacific railroad finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Conflict of interest, shocking in our day, was business as usual in theirs. And corruption was hardly an invention of the Grant administration. The scale of it, the intense competition among the press for a juicy story, and the general insecurity at a time of great economic and urban transformation fueled fears that the country had taken the Gospel of Money too far. Under ordinary circumstances, such reformist tantrums would eventually dissipate. In the context of continued unrest in the South, disorder in northern cities, and an impending presidential election, the advocates of pure government and pure electorates persisted. They did not end corruption, but they succeeded in ending the hopes of black Americans to become equal citizens.

The most serious charge against official corruption was that it corroded democracy by cheating the public of wealth and elevating unfit individuals to power. Walt Whitman lamented in 1871, “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” Governments, put into power by an incompetent electorate, condoned and participated in the “depravity.” The productive middle classes were the main victims of these activities. Whitman worried about the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage” that enabled the brigands to function unrestrained. The stories of greed and graft crowding the columns of the major dailies proved too much for Whitman, who vowed to close his ears and eyes to such news. He could no longer hear America singing:

Nay, tell me not to-day the publish'd shame,

Read not to-day the journal's crowded page,

The merciless reports still branding forehead after forehead,

The guilty column following guilty column,

To-day to me the tale refusing,

Turning from it—from the white capitol turning.
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For Whitman and many other Americans, the fire of war should have cleansed the body politic. That evidence abounded to the contrary was a matter of great heartbreak. America may have been reborn, but its new incarnation was hardly a state of grace. Preparing a new edition of
Leaves of Grass
in 1871, Whitman tellingly inserted this addition to his poem “Respondez!” originally written in 1856:

Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption!

Smother'd in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high;

Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean's waves around and upon you, Oh my days! my lands!

For not even those thunderstorms, nor fiercest lightnings of the war have purified the atmosphere.
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Mark Twain shared Whitman's concerns about untrammeled democracy. In
The Gilded Age
, there is no mawkish sentimentality about the common man. The people on the western frontier are “animals” and “cattle.” They spend their time gossiping, spitting, and whittling. New York is hardly better. Surveying a jury, Twain and Warner wrote, “Low foreheads and heavy faces they all had; some had a look of animal cunning, while the most were only stupid.” Washington lawmakers reflected their constituents, both in morals and physiognomy. Twain quipped in a banquet speech, “There is a Congressman—I mean a son of a bitch—But why do I repeat myself?” A dinner companion noted Twain's agitation on the subject, inveighing against “this wicked ungodly suffrage, where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God has made unequal was a wrong and a shame.” In an
Atlantic
article in 1875, Twain wrote, only half in jest, that instead of contracting the suffrage, the country should expand it so that “men of education, property, and achievement would receive five or even ten votes each.”
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